


collarbones and wristwatches (how i sing to your grave)

by Kalopsia



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Character Study, One Shot, Pining, Time - Freeform, kind of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2013-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-03 21:19:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1073167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalopsia/pseuds/Kalopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He thinks of Percy, even though he does not dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	collarbones and wristwatches (how i sing to your grave)

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys! 
> 
> the reaction to my last fic, kalopsia, was so fantastic. i had this lying in my docs as the result of some 3 a.m. writing session. i fixed it up a bit and thought it'd be good to post!
> 
> (and to think- this was originally going to be a happy christmas fic) (maybe next time :D) 
> 
> anyway, enjoy!

There are some things Nico will never understand.

For instance, the way the dead are at his command. He can split the earth open and summon so many piles of previously crumbling bodies it probably goes against every law of Physics there is. And yet, they obey him. They embody his every command, sometimes before he can say it.

And best of all, they listen.

Beyond that, he doesn’t understand Time. Even with the gods, and vague memories of the days from a time long gone, with ticking clocks and heavy sighs and teachers droning on and on and on. Even with electronic devices that are capable of giving time to the exact picosecond and watches buckled to wrists. When did it start? How can it possibly be right if the time was never counted from the very moment it began?

And sometimes Nico feels like that happy ten year old he used to be, after that last school and with Bianca, interrogating anybody who would give him the time. The questions he used to constantly ask still rattle around his skull and keep him up at night, weighing down in his bones and sometimes sending his mind reeling with hatred, with sadness, with desperation. That feeling never goes away, and neither do the memories of who he used to be.

From years ago, both three and seventy, he’s able to recall the smell of dusty doilies scattered on the armrest of his grandmother’s home. The soft pink yarn and his mother’s fingers in his hair. Those are easy, as are the memories of the silvery glitter of the Hunters’ dresses and the exact way Percy looked at him after the eighteenth or nineteenth question Nico had asked. It was kind of similar to the way he still does, only now there is pity in those emerald eyes.

Most of all, though, Nico doesn’t understand love.

  
※                ※              ※ 

 

Thoughts are everything and actions are never enough, not for the boy who wants what he can’t have. He’s fifteen years old and so utterly in love that every breath aches, every moment is his name. It confuses him, he does not know who or why is he this way. The internet tells him about dealing with crushes and possible psychoanalysis in queer children, but also that _it’s okay to be gay!_

His past hisses in his ear and wraps around him like a snake that crawls through his skin and whispers curses in his very mind.

His left side is the devil and the angel is his right, one shrieking  _no_ and the other _yes_. Both are so loud he does not know who is saying what.

But then Nico finds home in the sound of Percy’s laugh, deep and rumbling underneath the layers of clothing. He’s hugging him for no particular reason, and Percy is chuckling at the boy who will always be just that- a boy. He does not know why he needs this, but sometimes even the earth needs the sea, right?

He breathes his feelings into the orange of Percy’s shirt, so softly that not even the wind is able to hear. But that’s okay, because Nico can hear Percy’s heart at the height he is at, and for now, that is enough.

 

※                ※              ※ 

 

When he stepped into Tartarus he knew it would be bad, but never did he expect it to be this.

He tread on the body of a monster itself. Every step was a risk he had no choice but to take, and every breath was a gasp that had to be forced from the acidic air. He burned, burned with the hatred of a millennia’s worth of unavenged deaths and the sadness of the same. The cursed monsters and the plagued titans and the endless cries of heroes, these were all there. The dead whimpered in his ear and their torment became his. Nico found, for however strong he thought he was, that he is _nothing_ compared to this.

And then a cool blessing amidst the isolation, a name breathed into his ear as he woke from yet another nightmare.

_Percy Jackson._

And suddenly, he remembered everything.

The emerald eyes, the same color of the lake back at camp half-blood. The orange shirts and the ruffled hair and the laugh he can still hear with his head pressed into his chest. The love he had buried for so long suddenly came crashing through his walls and he had to fight to breathe as the emotion overwhelmed him. It hurts, this sort of love, but he would not trade it for the world.

For the first time in a long time, he felt human.

He kept walking

 

※                ※              ※ 

 

There’s a difference between knowing who he loves and voicing who he loves, and it is there that Nico comes apart.

He thinks, maybe, this is how that guy from that one myth felt in his final moments, with the warmth of the sun heating his back and the crush of impending doom threatening to stop his heart before the impact does it for him. He can’t remember his name, but the details of the story spring forward as if they were a long-repressed memory.

If Nico concentrates, he can almost imagine Daedalus’ workshop. The kalopsia that was his ultimate downfall and the aching love for his son as he watched him fall to the ground fill the air, even three thousand years later. The pain from the master artisan who watched his two most beautiful creations disappear under roaring water is still as fresh as the blood from an open wound.

Coincidentally, it was also the ocean, (or what has come from it), that seemed to be keeping him alive as he struggled to move even a single step. Tartarus bleeds you of that will, he found.

Nico thought he could imagine Daedalus’ pain, loving someone so _fucking_ much that it hurts to breathe, to think, to walk, and then losing them all together.

That is- until he actually met his ghost and the torment in his voice is something not even the son of Hades could ever bear to hear again.

 

※                ※              ※ 

 

Daedalus kept him company as he walked through the Underworld . He hears stories of brilliant inventions that, for all their worth, could not protect him from his heartache. Daedalus talks about a time where love conquered all but death and machinery was the same.

“The inventions were my love,” he said in Greek, for some things never change. “But even they could not prevent the inevitable.”

“Icarus, you mean?”

“Indeed. My son was my only. He was brilliant and kind, but still a child. Still interested in the way the world worked without having the slightest understanding of it. I should have explained it to him, I should have told him why instead of what.”

“What was it like? To… to watch him fall.”

“Oh, my friend,” Daedalus sighs. “It more than any anguish you could imagine, and I do not wish for you to try. Ask anyone who has lost something they have loved very dearly for very long, you will not be imagining the pain in their eyes.”

Nico smiled softly, mind buzzing with flashes of _percypercypercy,_ all green eyes and black hair and bones that stick from his neck in a way that Nico just wants to kiss. When he opens his mouth, however, a question he does not mean to ask tumbles out. “Did he know that you loved him?”

Daedalus sighs, letting his fingers uncurl and a small copper bird fluttering to the ground, the wings flapping too weakly for it to fly. “I like to believe so, yes. Then again, we all do, don’t we? Like to believe love goes without saying. It does not, though. Not really. That is something I wish I could have known.”

“Why did he do it then, if he knew?”

“He was young and foolish. I warned him not to fly to the sun, or even the waves and he did not listen. He felt free as the birds, but not even my wings could make him into one. He did not listen to me, and he fell. It is as simple as that. Surely even you can understand that sort of miscommunication?”

The younger boy lets that comment slide. “Do you ever see him down here?”

The inventor smiles. “I do not,” he says. “There’s a certain kind of sadness that tends to linger with the dead, even now, after all the years. It would not make things better to see him in the afterlife.”

The question seemed to make him sad, as Daedalus doesn’t speak again.

 

※                ※              ※ 

 

It all happens very fast.

He was just waking from the clutches of a night terror when he feels claws grasp his neck and warn him not to move.

“We do not want your blood spilled here, darling,” A voice hisses to his left, easy and slick. It slides down his ear like oil. “It is not the proper way for you to go.”

Briefly, Nico wonders what it’d take to have this monster kill him right then and there. He thinks it would be easier than facing what is to come.

But he goes with the enemy, is thrown into a bronze jar, and he puts himself to sleep.

 

He thinks of Percy, even though he does not dream.

 

※                ※              ※ 

 

Five pomegranate seeds later he is rescued and forced to watch a battle he never wanted to see. He watches Annabeth and Percy fall into the place of which he was just released, and eventually he helps them come back.

Percy still doesn’t love him.

But the ache Nico has for him is far more than enough to last a lifetime, to fuel the dying fires of himself and anybody else who wishes to so much as try as warm their hands, and he supposes that it’ll have to do.


End file.
